Thursday, August 4, 2011

Back to photography - a second SoFoBoMo 2011 photo book

I'll come back to my comparison between the Panasonic LX3 and LX5 in a day or two. But first some photographs, in a book.

The best way to learn to use a camera is to use it. This I have done after I got the LX5 on Monday. In fact, it turned out that there were enough photographs to make a SoFoBoMo 2011 book. After the first round of deletion I had 281 photographs, of which 68 were included in the book.

In 2010 I made a photo book using black-and-white photographs in 1:1 aspect ratio (square format). The title of that book was Summer in black and white squared. This year I though it would be good to be a bit less dogmatic: use color, and allow other aspect ratios.

The new book is titled From Pukaro to Valkmusa, and it is available in the PDF format (12.7 MB file).

This photo book illustrates summer in Finland: marsh, forest and lake views as well as garden, grill and sauna activities. The title refers to two places: Pukaron Paroni, a shopping center for travellers on the road 6, and Valkmusa National Park, where you can explore more than 30 different swamp types.

I benefited greatly from the instructions on making photo books which I updated earlier this summer when I made the first SoFoBoMo 2011 book, Treasure Pond. This time I made some improvements to the earlier efforts, fine-tuning the workflow. Tomorrow I'll try to make the Blurb version of the book to get a printed copy.

All in all, I have found the LX5 to be an excellent tool for photography. There were some minor problems, but nothing major. I'll come back to this later.

@Andreas: Well, you know, wild rosemary (Ledum palustre) smells rather strong, and they say that it may cause headache to some people. And according to Wikipedia, "All parts of the plant contain poisonous terpenes that affect the central nervous system. First symptoms of overdose are dizziness and disturbances in movement, followed by spasms, nausea, and unconsciousness."

Anyway, I keep on having problems with English in naming animals and plants (and other things like swamps, marshes, bogs etc.). Wild rosemary or marsh tea or nothern Labrador tea or ...

Of course the same applies to Finnish. We have quite a few different names for, as an example, to cloudberry: lakka, hilla, muurain, suomuurain, litti, valokki... But so does English (according to Wikipedia): cloudberry, bakeapple (in Atlantic Canada), Knotberry and Knoutberry (in England), Averin and Evron (in Scotland).

About Me

Juha Haataja works with information techology to support education, research, and culture. His hobbies include photography, literature, and outdoor activities. He lives in the capital region of Finland.